Actually, the Nordic relationship is a bit more distant than neighboring French provinces and Britain. And the Celts were everywhere in Europe befor Rome, so they contributed to everything. The Nordic types split off a long, long time ago.
You’re equating language family - obviously Finnish is not Germanic, or even related to Germanic - with ethnicity. You can’t really do that; the language a group of people speaks often correlates to ethnicity, but it certainly shouldn’t be regarded as anything more than a correlation. Whether the genetic stock of Finns is terribly distant from that of other Europeans, I couldn’t even guess. But you can’t equate what language a person speaks with their ethnicity. Otherwise, Lucy Liu counts as Germanic.
Do you have any evidence? England was settled in the 400s by folks straight outta what’s now Denmark. And the Norman French who later conquered England were at least originally Norse. I don’t know a ton about how much has been proven about the genetics of different countries in Europe, but establishing ancestry that way is a complicated question.
You made a good point, but Lucy Liu is also fluent in Mandarin.
Shit, you’re right. Bad example.
Well, Michelle Yeoh learned Mandarin as a second language. She’s a native speaker of English and Indonesian. However, she is neither Germanic nor Austronesian in ancestry.
Do you have a citation for this? I have never heard of the Nazis having anything against the Indians.
I don’t know that much about the Nazi racial “laws,” but I thought that only Jews were really considered to be subhuman by the Nazis. They certainly looked down on the other non-German ethnic groups around them, but they must not have hated them that much, since they didn’t have a problem cooperating with the Italians, the Ukrainians, the Hungarians, the Romanians, not to mention the Egyptians and other Arabs in the middle east.
All those other ethnicities might not have been part of the German master race, but as far as I know, the Nazis did not consider them to be subhumans, or else they would have been trying to exterminate all of them too. I think the Jews were the only people the Nazis wanted to wipe out.
Not to mention the Ark of the Covenant.. 
Also, didn’t Himmler and some other members of the Nazi “brain trust” entertain the theory that not only was the Earth hollow but that we all lived on the inside and that when we looked out into the “sky” at night, we weren’t really seeing stars but the lights of cities on the other side of interior of the Earth? I read an article where they actually tested the theory out (so they find a “shortcut” to bomb the allies) only to have it, of course, fail miserably. I would’ve found the whole story comical were it not for the fact these were Nazis doing it. I then wondered if it wasn’t some type of propaganda hoax designed to make Hitler and the Nazis look more crazy, stupid, and ludicrous than they already were.
Regarding the OP, there’s an interesting book called The Aryan Myth by Leon Poliakov which describes the evolution of European racist, anti-Semitic, and extreme nationalistic “thought” from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. If you can find it, it’s worth a read so you’ll know how and why Hitler and others of his philosophical ilk ended up believing what they did.
So sorry, of course the Nazis were not at all racist were they?
But did they actually consider the Indians to be subhuman?
The Nazis were all racist, but it was only the Jews that they were trying to eliminate from the world. Their reasoning was that the Jews were a people without a land, with no connections to the soil or to any kind of nationalism, and because of this, they would forever wander around sucking the life-blood out of established civilizations. They viewed them as “parasites.” They really did think they were subhuman.
And by the way, my request for a citation was not meant to be mean (Can you PROVE IT? Huh? HUH?!) I was just wondering if there’s any kind of official record of Nazi policy towards the people of the Indian subcontinent…since they borrowed so much “aryan” baloney from them, I have a hard time seeing the Nazis condemn the real “aryans” with a straight face.
I’ve searched and searched but can find no actual citation that Hitler considered non-whites to be sub-human. I believe he did but I can’t prove it.
My previous reply to you was a little bit nasty. I apologise.
Another link between Indian Aryans and Hitler-style Aryans is the fact that the swastika is a very common religious symbol in India. When I went to India it at first was startling to see many of the buses bedecked with swastikas.
Isn’t the Swastika also a Native American symbol?
If so, isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that it was used by two totally different groups?
The Nazis could condemn anybody with a straight face. Hitler came to power as an anti-communist, but he made a non-aggression treaty with Stalin - until he was ready to attack the USSR. IIRC, it was also part of some overture Nazi diplomats made to the U.S., that “we’re both anti-communist.” :rolleyes:
Of course, he was no more successful against “Field Marshall Winter” than Napoleon, but he gave it a good try. And had lotsa help from various ethnicities that the Soviets had been oppressing, killing, sending to the gulags … stuff like that. But Hitler has an amzing ability to say whatever served the purpose of the moment.
Ah, yes. I recall seeing something last year (or maybe the year before) about somebody wanting/trying to rehabilitate the symbol. It is a very ancient religious symbol in India.
The Master speaks: Was the swastika actually an old Native American symbol?
And an even more remarkable coincidence was that they were both called Indians! 
Well, the text of Mein Kampf is online. I can’t find anything specifically about India or the Indians, but from Chapter XI: Nation and Race:
So, most likely the official Nazi line would be that the somewhat lighter skin colors found among the people of northern India are all that’s left of the alleged Aryan “master race”, who conquered the place but then forgot about the “principle of blood purity” and were therefore “lost” through interbreeding with the “lesser races”.
By Indo-Aryan I meant the Indic side of Indo-Iranian.
Indo-Iranian is a definite subgroup within IE. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan sides share a number of very similar features that put them close together taxonomically. Many words in Old Persian are identical or nearly identical with their cognates in Sanskrit. You can even find such identical cognates in modern Persian and Hindi. Maybe you could offer a cite for “most linguists” avoiding the term Indo-Aryan like it has cooties. My whole point above was that prefacing it with “Indo-” is enough to detoxify it. The last I looked, Indo-Aryan was still being used for the Indian side of Indo-Iranian. Probably it has survived because it’s more accurate, since “Indic” could mean India in general, which includes other language families, Dravidian and Munda.
It isn’t inappropriate to call the Sanskrit-speaking invaders of India c. 1500 BC “Aryan,” since that’s what they called themselves. It would be a misuse of the term to apply it to all Proto-Indo-Europeans or Kurganniks, especially the ones who went to Europe. That’s one of the Nazi errors. When IE studies was in its infancy, there arose the mistaken notion that all IE languages are “descended from Sanskrit.” The reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European in the mid-19th century depended heavily on Sanskrit, because Hittite wasn’t known yet, and the discovery of Hittite, as old as Vedic Sanskrit but very different, meant the whole thing had to be revised. Maybe the confusion of Sanskrit as the ancestor of all IE languages went along with a further confusion that the Aryans (speakers of Sanskrit) were the ancestors of all IE-speaking people in Europe.
Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s genetic research on world populations has shown that Finns and Germans are quite close genetically. (One explanation proposed for this: Finns were the original population of northern Europe right after the last Ice Age, and the Germanic languages were a result of IE blending with this Finnic substrate. The Finno-Ugric languages as a whole also show some very early loanwords from Proto-Indo-European, as well as from Iranian. PFU and PIE must have been in contact circa 4000-5000 BC, somewhere in Russia.) IIRC, the Saami people (Lapps) are genetically much farther away from Finns and Germans alike, even though they speak a Finnic language. Just goes to show that language and genetics have nothing really to do with one another.
You should have looked a little longer at Vol I, Chap XI. “History … shows with a startling clarity, that whenever Aryans have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race the result has been the downfall of the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture. In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. In these latter countries the immigrants-who mainly belonged to the Latin races-mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear am decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in NortJ America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to tne habit of adulterating its blood.”
We in the US can also be proud that Hitler approved of our Oriental exclusion policy: From Vol II, Chap III: “At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter.”
“It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People’s State.”
Kinda makes you want to sing It’s A Grand Old Flag.
Johanna writes:
> Maybe you could offer a cite for “most linguists” avoiding the term Indo-Aryan
> like it has cooties.
I said that they don’t like to use the term, not that they avoid it “like it has cooties.” In any case, I withdraw that claim. I’ve checked a few more references and it appears that a fair amount of linguists do use the term “Indo-Aryan.”
Johanna: *It isn’t inappropriate to call the Sanskrit-speaking invaders of India c. 1500 BC “Aryan,” since that’s what they called themselves. *
It’s probably a bit inappropriate to call them “invaders”, though, since it’s now considered that the Vedic-Sanskrit or Old-Indo-Aryan-speaking newcomers from the Afghan mountains most likely didn’t actually invade the Panjab and Gandhara regions in the second millennium—not in a military sense at least. They just kinda oozed in and became dominant, possibly due to a thinning of the previous population of the urban/agricultural Indus Valley culture migrating southwards and eastwards because of environmental changes.
By the way, though I agree that “Indo-Aryan” is still a respectable term in academic Indo-European linguistics, “Aryan” has some less respectable associations in Indian popular culture. The 80-year-old Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Group or RSS), a Hindu-nationalist organization that is very influential in Hindu Indian society, drew much of its original inspiration from Nazi racial theories (conveniently overlooking the Nazi opinion that Aryan-descended Indians were “contaminated” by mixing with lesser, darker races). The racialist and anti-democratic “Aryan ideal” (with high-caste Indian Hindus, particularly Brahmanas, in the role of the “master race”) is still the social goal of RSS philosophy.
This is why you can find copies of Mein Kampf for sale in most bookstores in India—RSS supporters still subscribe to some of Hitler’s ideas, and they’re a big market. (However, the ubiquitous use of the Indian swastika symbol probably has very little to do with RSS ideology. As noted above, it’s a very ancient Indian religious symbol and Indians have been using it right along for many centuries as an auspicious mark, regardless of whether some foreign loonies happened to be putting it on their flags, or for that matter in their churches.)
So I’d be inclined to suspect that an Indian-looking driver with “ARYAN” on his vanity plate is a Hindu nationalist proclaiming his support for RSS ideology, not just saying “Hey, my ancestral language family is identified by linguists as Indo-Aryan”.
As for the hollow world theory, the most notable champion of this theory was Cyrus Teed . In the late 1800’s he convinced a bunch of folks that the earth was hollow and that they should follow him down to Estero, Florida to found a utopian society. Cyrus changed his name to Koresh (Hmmm, sound familiar?) and proved that the Earth was hollow on Estero Island (now the Town of Fort Myers Beach) using a device called a recti-lineator. I have vistited the increasingly restored Koreshan site a few times (I live about 11-12 miles from it) and worked with the grand-daughter of the inventor of the recti-lineator. The recti-lineator was pretty much a window frame and a string.
Oh, and if you want your religion to thrive and prosper, don’t promote celibacy as one of it’s prime tenets.